YMMV / Metroid: Zebes Shin'nyuu Shirei

• Anti-Climax Boss: The Doublehopper; assuming you have the Ice Beam it's even easier to kill than a normal Sidehopper, going down in one flurry of shots.
• Demonic Spiders: Sidehoppers, especially early on. They can only be harmed by missiles, which have a 50% chance to miss and are limited in ammo, or an upgraded beam (and the Ice Beam can freeze them for a quick escape but only has a 50% rate of actually killing one), they get to make two attacks for four energy apiece every round, one of which always hits even if the player books it the second after seeing them or caps them with the Ice Beam before going for the kill, and they start showing up pretty early on. There're a couple and an upgraded version right outside Kraid's lair, just to make sure you've got to be lucky to get into that fight with full energy and ammo, though at least tagging them with the Ice Beam and running helps.
• Disappointing Last Level: As per Metroid tradition, and it arguably applies twice.
  • Tourian is, as usual, a straightforward, zigzagging gauntlet of difficult enemy encounters with minimal exploration. While Metroids and Mother Brain aren't chumps, exactly, they're still not markedly more difficult than everything else provided you've gotten all the upgrades, learned the secret of killing the former, and came in with the Ice Beam. Heck, with even modest luck and a decent starting missile pool, fighting Metroids is generally more lucrative than farming outside Tourian if you're not in danger of clicking empty on missiles; they drop generous amounts of both energy and missiles on death without ever whiffing on rewards, and the player has a good chance of freezing them and either blasting them apart or running for it before the fight even starts. Mother Brain herself does have a ton of health and hits pretty hard, but with all upgrades she doesn't actually hurt more than a Metroid, and the player gets two saves each round, potentially taking no damage at all and getting out of some of it easily with, again, the Ice Beam; coming in with a decent haul of missiles and health makes her defeat a foregone conclusion.
  • Post-Tourian, the game turns into a traditional Choose Your Own Adventure novel, and not a particularly inspired one at that.
• Goddamn Bats: While every early enemy applies before you get a way to give your attacks more than 50% accuracy, Zebs are particularly noteworthy because they're explicitly intended to be enemies that can be farmed for energy and ammo, but due to the randomness of the combat system, it's very easy to come out behind if you're unlucky. Worse, a new Zeb always spawns after the old one dies, and unless you have the Ice Beam they'll ding Samus for free damage as she makes her escape from the encounter. And even the Varia Suit, which reduces damage by half, can't reduce damage below one; the endless chip hits of chaff enemies remain a potentially humiliating threat at low health, and there's no way to get health back but killing enemies.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Despite being an obscure book from 1986 with lots of Early-Installment Weirdness, this gamebook also contains a lot of Adaptation Expansion that ended up working its way into later canonical Metroid games:
  • Super Metroid: Ridley is redesigned to appear more like a Xenomorph Xerox. The stolen Metroid capsule contains an enlarged mutant Metroid, which shares a unique relationship with Samus that no other Metroid has shown. This mutant Metroid interrupts Samus's final battle with the Space Pirates' leader, giving her the opportunity to emerge victorious.
  • Metroid Fusion: As Samus tries to find an escape ship, an advanced form of Metroid can be fought as the Final Boss in the docking bay.
  • Metroid Prime: Samus has a computer that Enemy Scans the creatures she encounters.
  • Metroid: Zero Mission: Ridley is initially seen nowhere inside his room, and only appears behind Samus when she attempts to leave with an important item. After defeating Mother Brain and escaping Tourian in her original mission to Zebes, Samus is forced to evacuate her own gunship due to an enemy attack. She then boards a massive Space Pirate ship and has her helmet removed, exposing her identity. She then defeats the Space Pirates' de-facto leader and flees in an escape ship before the Space Pirate ship explodes.
  • Metroid Prime 2: Echoes: A heavily-mutated Metroid has an obsession with viewing Samus as its Arch-Enemy. It repeatedly survives and regenerates from being defeated by Samus, even when the site of their battle is destroyed.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Combat is a tedious exercise in randomness and frustration, even in Twinetroid which automates what was once an even more complicated process. Even against the weakest chaff enemies in the game, Samus has a fifty-fifty chance of whiffing, giving them free hits and draining her energy pool faster than she can replenish it with random drops from killing them. Missiles can defeat powerful foes, and are often required for the strongest enemies, but they're strictly limited in ammo, drops for them are very stingy, and every last one has a flat 50% chance of missing outright, giving enemies yet more free damage on Samus, especially bosses that can't be harmed with anything else. It's very easy to go from half health to dead from a string of bad luck trying to farm the weakest enemy in the game, one specifically designed to be repeatedly fought to replenish energy. Oh and every enemy has a chance of dropping nothing on death too. Even climbing out of the Early Game Hell merely blunts rather than removes these frustrations.
  • Twinetroid automatically saves at various points during the Choose Your Own Adventure portion of the ending, meaning to see some of the multiple endings the player has to play through the entire game multiple times.

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